Spending a lot of time in the car on the way home from Thanksgiving gave me a lot of time to think about an idea for a Warhammer gaming table. The idea is a bit of an amalgam of three technologies that I have seen somewhat recently:
- Projectors hanging from the ceiling: I call this a technology, but I guess it’s more of an idea. My first interest in this idea spawned when I saw someone using it as a method for projecting dungeon maps onto a gaming table where the characters would then move around their miniatures to simulate their characters moving through the dungeon. The beauty of this idea, in my mind, was it’s simplicity – there was no program running in the background, it was simply a method of projecting a map somewhere useful.
- Team Ninja’s fusing of webcam technology with a projector: Jessa’s senior project group is working on a piece of software that allows a feedback loop to the process – the projector projects a virtual environment and uses the webcam to allow a physical interaction. They are currently working on how to allow the virtual environment to communicate with “smart” physical objects so that they can interact both ways.
- The L3D’s Pita Board (at least, I think that’s what it’s called): This bit of tech uses an electronic chess board built into the table to allow the table to detect the locations of certain keyed physical objects. The interesting thing here, for me, is not so much the board itself, so much as the method of user interface. Moving the figures on the board allows the user to change what the program is doing and how it works, without ever having to touch a keyboard or mouse.
Now that you know where I’m coming from, let me flesh out the idea a little more…
First, it’s worth noting the goals of the project: I want a practical and feasible gaming aid – I’m not looking for something that replaces any of the hobby aspects of Warhammer, nor am I trying to design something that encompasses all of the rules of Warhammer so that it could play the game for you; I’m simply looking for something that makes gameplay more streamlined, and fun.
That being said, I want to start with a projector and webcam hanging from a ceiling and projecting down onto a gaming table. The goal here is that there is nothing special about the gaming table – it can be a ping-pong table, a dinner table, or even just the floor (though, preferably a hard surface like a basement or wooden floor). The primary reason for not making the table “smart” is two-fold: I want to limit the tech level of this setup to make it practical and feasible to own/make for even a casual DIYer (like myself), but I also want to make it somewhat portable, and moving a Warhammer sized table around just isn’t going to happen. To start simply, the physical feedback (what’s being picked up from the web cam) is going to be the locations of a set of markers to control the UI (similar in nature to the keyboardless UI of the Pita Board) and a standard laser pointer (or maybe a green one). Again, the goal being to keep things inexpensive where possible to keep it practical.
Now, in my mind, there are innumerable things that could be projected onto the table – terrain, cover, critters, even entire squads with enough work, but I really want to focus on things that I feel are challenges to gameplay: measuring distances, placing templates, and rolling dice. The goal here being that hobbiests have solved the problem of terrain (I’ve seen some of the stuff that Ian and Uncle Clayton have made) and tracking the location of squads is starting to cross that line of gameplay rules. Exactly what is projected and where will be controlled by the UI markers and the laser pointer – In general, the markers will provide what should be projected (movement radii, distances, templates, etc.) while the laser pointer provides the “where” component (the center of the circle, the start and end points for the measurement, where the center of the template is, etc.).
That’s the general gist of what I’m going for with this – details will be worked out in a future post. Comments, suggestions (especially from the Warhammer players out there), and other feedback definitely welcome.